Working to make government work better

” Design Jam London 1 Johnny Holland – It’s all about interaction … At hackdays, the only time when outcomes are being shared is during the (often very short) presentations at the end of the day. At a Design Jam, the process is just as important as the outcome. How did you get this idea? How did you approach the problem? To allow teams to compare their processes and bounce ideas off each other, the groups shared what they had done so far before lunch. Articulating their ideas and getting questions from the audience helped teams to focus, and seeing how other teams had taken completely different steps got everybody reflecting on the many different ways to explore a problem.

None of the above statements are true. I can name perhaps two people who may fall into one or two of the above categories, but I know no one who actually fits all three. So let’s start from there.

Seeing through transparency? | I is for…. Don’t get me wrong – I do believe that transparency is important. The point is, though, that transparency can be dangerous without engagement. If the processes, conversations and decisions of our public services are really to become transparent, then public servants need to have the tools (and that means the technical resources, the skills, and the backing) to contextualise, to consult, to explain, and at the end of the day to defend, their own actions. Otherwise the release of post hoc data will only encourage witch-hunts and scare stories which reinforce the view that public servants are, literally, a bunch of wasters.

OPM Blog: a community for public interest discussions » User experiences of the welfare-to-work system The LSP wanted to gather the experiences of service users on the provision and systems to move from welfare to work. The hypothesis was that people can become trapped in a rigid welfare-to-work system and be put on journeys over which they have little control.These people are not involved in co-producing outcomes and are constrained in their ability to draw on their existing strengths or wider resources. The result is unnecessary duplication in provision or courses of action without clear goals. The dream of obtaining paid employment never seems to be realised.